Scholarship 2.0 is devoted to describing and documenting the forms, facets, and features of alternative Web-based scholarly publishing philosophies and practices. The variety of old and new metrics available for assessing the impact, significance, and value of Web-based scholarship is of particular interest.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

[snip]Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

[snip]

That transformation was behind the recent decision by the prestigious 60-year-old Shakespeare Quarterly to embark on an uncharacteristic experiment in the forthcoming fall issue — one that will make it, Ms. Rowe says, the first traditional humanities journal to open its reviewing to the World Wide Web.

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

The Shakespeare Quarterly trial, along with a handful of other trailblazing digital experiments, goes to the very nature of the scholarly enterprise. [snip]

[snip].

Each type of review has benefits and drawbacks.

[snip]

Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion. Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable; exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants. Open review more closely resembles Wikipedia behind the scenes, where anyone with an interest can post a comment. This open-door policy has made Wikipedia, on balance, a crucial reference resource.

Ms. Rowe said the goal is not necessarily to replace peer review but to use other, more open methods as well.

[snip]

The most daunting obstacle to opening up the process is that peer-review publishing is the path to a job and tenure, and no would-be professor wants to be the academic canary in the coal mine.

The first question that Alan Galey, a junior faculty member at the University of Toronto, asked when deciding to participate in The Shakespeare Quarterly’s experiment was whether his essay would ultimately count toward tenure. “I went straight to the dean with it,” Mr. Galey said. (It would.)

Although initially cautious, Mr. Galey said he is now “entirely won over by the open peer review model.” The comments were more extensive and more insightful, he said, than he otherwise would have received on his essay, which discusses Shakespeare in the context of information theory.

Advocates of more open reviewing, like Mr. Cohen at George Mason argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.

“There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

It's safe to say that most Americans don't spend much time thinking about intellectual property law. But in Common As Air, Lewis Hyde explains why these laws profoundly affect our culture -- and how they are based on assumptions that are artificial, illogical and outdated.

[snip]

.... [I]ntellectual property laws affect our culture profoundly, in ways that go beyond college students being taken to court for downloading songs. Some people believe that not only are current copyright laws too stringent, but that the assumptions the current laws are based on are artificial, illogical and outdated.

Among them is Lewis Hyde, a professor of art and politics who has studied these issues for years. In his new book Common As Air, Hyde says he's suspicious of the concept of "intellectual property" to begin with, calling it "historically strange." Hyde backs it up with an impressive amount of research; he spends a significant amount of time reflecting on the Founding Fathers, who came up with America's initial copyright laws.

Hyde is a contrarian, but he's not a scorched-earth opponent of all copyright laws. He does believe the national paradigm for intellectual property issues should be changed, though, at one point offering several examples of the absurd situations the current laws have created. [snip]Hyde advocates for a return to a "cultural commons" and quotes, approvingly, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that "ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man."

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Published: August 16, 2010 > EASTON, Pa. (AP) — Last year, students in an Easton Area High School entrepreneurship class were assigned to write business plans. While reviewing them, teachers quickly realized one student had copied entire portions of his from a plan posted on the Internet.

[snip]

"There is a blurred vision by many in this digital age because there's just so much information they have access to," Koch said. "It's very difficult for them to filter what is mine and what is yours. It's all out there for you to utilize."

Although local educators said they haven't seen any rise in plagiarism cases lately, many found students from a generation raised on the Internet have a different perspective on what constitutes plagiarism.

[snip]

"Some students seem to think that whatever is out there is free to take," said Ed Lotto, director of first-year writing at Lehigh University. "They seem to think it's common knowledge and they can cite common knowledge without citation."

Plagiarism is a cultural, nationwide phenomenon. The problem is not limited to the Lehigh Valley.

[snip]

Lotto said the problem may manifest, in part, from the way the Internet has changed young people's perspective about digital media.

[snip]

"It's the culture they grew up in," Lotto said. "And that would affect their perception of ownership of things in the world."

[snip]

Part of the problem, he said, is students learn at a young age to use the Internet as a research tool, but are not necessarily instructed early on what requires a citation and how to cite it.

"I think it's a problem in the curriculum for younger grades," Ziegler said. "There has to be a way to better transition those kids from middle school reports to high school reports."

Other local educators don't necessarily see a connection between students raised in the digital age and plagiarism.

Hannah Stewart-Gambino, dean of Lafayette College, said students are instructed as thoroughly as ever about what constitutes plagiarism and most know the difference between what is right and wrong.

"Even as humans were scratching rudimentary writing into tree bark, the inclination to claim work that is not one's own has been human nature," Stewart-Gambino said. "I'm not convinced technology or the Internet has altered human nature or that temptation substantially, frankly."

Editorial Comment > Are You Serious ???

But she does believe students have difficulty differentiating between legitimate sources on the Internet and nonacademic sources.

[snip]

Just as music companies and film studios have had to change their online sales models in response to illegal downloading, Lotto said some educators have suggested schools will have to change their views of what constitutes plagiarism due to the rise of the Internet.

"I've heard it argued a change in perspective of plagiarism is coming, that we shouldn't be too hard-nosed about it," he said. "I'm an older guy, so I don't really buy it so much, but I do hear it sometimes from younger teachers and graduate students."

Lotto added, "It's going to change. I don't know how or in what way, but you can see it."

Hadrian's Wall is a stone and turf fortification built by the Roman Empire across the width of modern-day England. ... [It was] 117 kilometres long,

... [I]ts width and height [were] dependent on the construction materials [that] ... were available nearby.

... [T]he wall in the east follow[ed] the outcrop of a hard, resistant igneous diabase rock escarpment ... Local limestone was used in the construction, except for ... section[s] in the west ... where turf was used instead ... .

The Broad Wall was initially built with a clay-bonded rubble core and mortared dressed rubble facing stones, but this seems to have made it vulnerable to collapse, and repair with a mortared core was sometimes necessary.... [I]n time ... [Hadrian's] Wall was abandoned and fell into ruin. Over the centuries and even into the twentieth century a large proportion of the stone was reused in other local buildings.

Throughout history, humans have (re)used local resources to create not only buildings and fortifications, but monuments, roads, and a wide variety of other structures. For countless generations, artists, composers, and writers have freely incorporated elements from local and distant cultures to create new visual, musical, and textual forms.

In The Web 2.0 World, the open (re)combination of multiple media has become commonplace in many venues, practices that Lawrence Lessig [snip], founder of Creative Commons [snip]and others, would characterize as emblematic of a 'Remix ' or 'Read/Write' culture. Indeed, from his point of view, “the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process” [snip]

In the recently-released Horizon Report 2008 - a joint publication of the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), six emerging information technologies and practices that are expected to significantly impact educational organizations are profiled: Grassroots Video, Collaborative Webs, Mobile Broadband, Data Mashups, Collaborative Intelligence, and Social Operating Systems.

In this presentation, we will review the Read/Write Traditions of the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences; analyze key Past / Present / Future Participatory Technologies; and explore the potential of Web 2.0 for creating/fostering Disruptive Learning / Scholarship / Teaching in the 21st century.

The Director's Cut of the (150+ Slides) PPT is available from my _Scholarship 2.0_ blog at

Saturday, August 14, 2010

On Augst 12 2010, The NYTimes piblished an article titled "Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s" >>>

In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain.

In scheduled presentation(s), we will briefly profile select developments related to these major themes and speculate on their potential evolution and impact on research and scholarship in the coming decade(s).

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

New York Times columnist, Stanley Fish, " ... a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago," recently published his most recent NY Times Opininator column titled >

Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal

[snip]

Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and morally inflated. But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.

[snip]

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no. But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some) ... .

[snip]

And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself.

It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.[more]

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Assessing Assessment > Transparency, education and communication are key to ensuring that appropriate metrics are used to measure individual scientific achievement / 16 June 2010

Do Metrics Matter? > Many researchers believe that quantitative metrics determine who gets hired and who gets promoted at their institutions. With an exclusive poll and interviews, Nature probes to what extent metrics are really used that way / 16 June 2010A Profusion Of Measures > Scientific performance indicators are proliferating — leading researchers to ask afresh what they are measuring and why. Richard Van Noorden surveys the rapidly evolving ecosystem / 16 June 2010

Science Economics: What Science Is Really Worth > Spending on science is one of the best ways to generate jobs and economic growth, say research advocates. But as Colin Macilwain reports, the evidence behind such claims is patchy / 9 June 2010

How To Improve The Use Of Metrics >Since the invention of the science citation index in the 1960s, quantitative measuring of the performance of researchers has become ever more prevalent, controversial and influential. Six commentators tell Nature what changes might ensure that individuals are assessed more fairly / 16 June 2010

Let's Make Science Metrics More Scientific > To capture the essence of good science, stakeholders must combine forces to create an open, sound and consistent system for measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity, says Julia Lane / 24 March 2010

Sunday, August 8, 2010

I am posting to ask if you are aware of any efforts that have/seek to create (a) metric(s) that measure the The Prescience Of Citations(s) > Publication(s) > Research > Scholarship > Work > Etc. Relative To Current / Recent Citations(s) > Publication(s) > Research > Scholarship > Work > Etc.

That Is >>>

Are there Measures of Previous Activities that have / now been (more) widely Cited > Quoted > Etc > ?

In Short >

Are There Any/All Measure(s) Of The Impact of Those Who Knew / Saw The Future > Before Their Time ? (But Enough About Me [:-)])

Certainly Citaton Analyses / Studies Are One Metric > > >

And I am aware of "A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures", which I blogged just over a year ago >>>

The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new impact measures has been proposed on the basis of social network analysis and usage log data. Here we investigate how these new measures relate to each other, and how accurately and completely they express scientific impact.

BTW: We would not only focus on Nobel Prize winners; certainly less Noble [:-)] individuals should be considered >>>

And

Would Not The ***Number of Rejections*** prior to eventual publication and high-citations / Etc. be an Indicator of

??? >>>Prescience <<< ???

And

Could Other Negative Actions (Criticism ; Protests ; Bad Reviews ; Etc.) Of A Work That Subsequently Became Widely Recognized As Innovative / Insightful / Pioneering / Etc. [?] Also Be Another Component Of

??? >>> The Vanguard Factor <<< ???

And

Could The Lag Time Between Original Publication / Presentation / Etc. And Subsequent Adoption (At Various Thesholds) Be Useful, That Is >>>

The Longer It Took For An Idea To Become Widely Accepted (At Specific Thesholds), The Greater The Vanguard Factor ?

Others ? >>>

Your (Prescient [:-)] Thoughts ? / Please Leave As A Comment >>>

BTW: I've been/will be in touch with The Usual Suspects > Stevan, Gene, Barry, two of whom are native Bronxites like myself [To my knowledge Stevan is not [:-)]

!!! Thanks A Million !!!

/Gerry

" There Is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come!" / Victor Hugo

Friday, August 6, 2010

More than 300 years since the invention of peer review and 30 years post-Web, it’s time to act. Lest we forget, the Web was originally designed to disrupt scientific publishing, as recently noted by Michael Clarke in the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

The first major disruption has been open access (OA) publishing, a prerequisite for the new metrics, which thrive on increasing numbers of papers and data. And despite its fledgling status, OA has ushered in a second major disruption to the scientific establishment: post-publication peer review (PPPR), in a variety of experiments and formulations, pioneered by BioMedCentral and PubMedCentral.

[snip]

Thus, transparency and ongoing scrutiny by a much wider community can minimize the failures of traditional peer review (depicted on the cover of this issue), and can also bring to light innovations and discoveries that may have been ahead of the curve at the time of publication. Robust involvement by the community is required, and proposed “reputation systems” may be the key to ensure rewards for commenting and revising.

Peer review isn’t perfect— meet 5 high-impact papers that should have ended up in bigger journal

[snip]

One of the most commonly voiced criticisms of traditional peer review is that it discourages truly innovative ideas, rejecting field-changing papers while publishing ideas that fall into a status quo and the “hot” fields of the day—think RNAi, etc. Another is that it is nearly impossible to immediately spot the importance of a paper—to truly evaluate a paper, one needs months, if not years, to see the impact it has on its field.

In the following pages, we present some papers that suggest these two criticisms are correct, at least in part. These studies were published in lower-profile journals (all with current impact factors of 6 or below), suggesting they should have had less of an impact. But these papers eventually accumulated at least 1,000 citations. Many were rejected from higher-tier journals. All changed their fields forever.

Twenty years ago, David Kaplan of the Case Western Reserve University had a manuscript rejected, and with it came what he calls a “ridiculous” comment. “The comment was essentially that I should do an x-ray crystallography of the molecule before my study could be published,” he recalls, but the study was not about structure. The x-ray crystallography results, therefore, “had nothing to do with that,” he says. To him, the reviewer was making a completely unreasonable request to find an excuse to reject the paper.

Kaplan says these sorts of manuscript criticisms are a major problem with the current peer review system, particularly as it’s employed by higher-impact journals. Theoretically, peer review should “help [authors] make their manuscript better,” he says, but in reality, the cutthroat attitude that pervades the system results in ludicrous rejections for personal reasons—if the reviewer feels that the paper threatens his or her own research or contradicts his or her beliefs, for example—or simply for convenience, since top journals get too many submissions and it’s easier to just reject a paper than spend the time to improve it. Regardless of the motivation, the result is the same, and it’s a “problem,” Kaplan says, “that can very quickly become censorship.”

The introduction of PubMed in the mid-1990s revolutionized the process of finding and retrieving relevant literature. With much of the drudgery and inconvenience gone, long lists of potentially important publications could be compiled quickly and easily on any computer with an Internet connection. The parallel development of reference database management software further expanded the ability to compile and organize large numbers of abstracts, and ultimately article PDFs.

On one hand, these impressive tools greatly facilitated preparation of comprehensive literature reviews with unprecedented breadth. On the other hand, easy access to so many publications reinforced the temptation to read each paper cited less critically, and sometimes not at all. Thus was born the practice of citing numerous diverse publications to support a point of discussion, instead of citing the one or two most relevant publications with the greatest impact on a field, as if quantity and quality of citations were interchangeable and equally persuasive. [snip]

Monday, August 2, 2010

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

[snip]

Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

[snip]

In an interview, ... [Susan D. Blum University of Notre Dame anthropologist ... and author of "Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture" [Cornell Universiy Press, 2009], said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

[snip]

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

Hadrian's Wall is a stone and turf fortification built by the Roman Empire across the width of modern-day England. ... [It was] 117 kilometres long,

... [I]ts width and height [were] dependent on the construction materials [that] ... were available nearby.

... [T]he wall in the east follow[ed] the outcrop of a hard, resistant igneous diabase rock escarpment ... Local limestone was used in the construction, except for ... section[s] in the west ... where turf was used instead ... .

The Broad Wall was initially built with a clay-bonded rubble core and mortared dressed rubble facing stones, but this seems to have made it vulnerable to collapse, and repair with a mortared core was sometimes necessary.... [I]n time ... [Hadrian's] Wall was abandoned and fell into ruin. Over the centuries and even into the twentieth century a large proportion of the stone was reused in other local buildings.

Throughout history, humans have (re)used local resources to create not only buildings and fortifications, but monuments, roads, and a wide variety of other structures. For countless generations, artists, composers, and writers have freely incorporated elements from local and distant cultures to create new visual, musical, and textual forms.

In The Web 2.0 World, the open (re)combination of multiple media has become commonplace in many venues, practices that Lawrence Lessig [snip], founder of Creative Commons [snip]and others, would characterize as emblematic of a 'Remix ' or 'Read/Write' culture. Indeed, from his point of view, “the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process” [snip]

In the recently-released Horizon Report 2008 - a joint publication of the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), six emerging information technologies and practices that are expected to significantly impact educational organizations are profiled: Grassroots Video, Collaborative Webs, Mobile Broadband, Data Mashups, Collaborative Intelligence, and Social Operating Systems.

In this presentation, we will review the Read/Write Traditions of the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences; analyze key Past / Present / Future Participatory Technologies; and explore the potential of Web 2.0 for creating/fostering Disruptive Learning / Scholarship / Teaching in the 21st century.

The Director's Cut of the (150+ Slides) PPT is available from my _Scholarship 2.0_ blog at

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About Me

I formerly had primary responsibilities for Collection Development, Instruction, and Reference and Research Services in Chemical and Biological Engineering; Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering; Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering; and Mechanical Engineering; Alternative Energy; Environment Sciences with the Library of Iowa State University. I was employed from April 1987 to July 2014.
Prior to joining ISU, I served as the Museum Librarian at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, and as an Assistant Librarian with the Library of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, my hometown.
I received my Master of Science degree in Library Science from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign in 1975, and my undergraduate degree in Anthropology from Lehman College of the City University of New York, The Bronx.